Hi there, I've been using this as an explorer replacement for about a week now and already hooked! I've been on a mission to organize my stuff and the next item on the agenda is my ebook library. I mostly use a kindle and since amazon's native solutions still suck, my library is complete chaos. I use 'send to kindle' quite a bit for all sorts of things and at this point it's more like 'send to black hole'.
I'm looking at software, mainly alfa ebooks, calibre, and kindlian, but is there a way to use DOpus to achieve this either without the use of more software or as an integration of some kind? Mainly I'd like to sync all the books and other material in my kindle and use DOpus to organize it, ideally showing a thumbnail of book covers although given kindle's proprietary firmware I don't know how or if that's possible.
If none of that is possible, I'd love to hear what others are using to achieve ebook organization zen.
Thanks!
So I keep a kindle folder on the PC, with subfolder for author names, and books in each one (don't need subfolders, but its just easier than 1,000 books in one folder).
Plug in the Kindle.
Then synchronise the files on PC with those on the Kindle (I cant recall the right folder name on the kindle, but its easy to find). Or just drag and drop the PC folder to the kindle. Only mobi or azw files of course.
Of course you need to think carefully about which mode of synchronisation if there are some files on the kindle you want to keep - but I keep them all on my PC library just in case I overwrite one unintentionally.
Just note that the kindle takes time to locate and index multiple files added this way. Just leave the kindle on for a while to catch up.
Heaps of other ways, this is just my MO.
Also, the kindle folder on my PC is just a tiny subset of my book collection - just those I want on the kindle itself. But those archived books (over 50,000) are also stored in folders based on author first - last name. This way, I have the epub or pdf versions in those folders too. The kindle folder is thus small and focussed (in relative terms of course)
You can also create a context menu in Opus for "ebooks" filetype category that has a "Convert to azw3" and "Send to Kindle" menu options.
It uses Calibre's commandline utility to do the conversion of any selected ebook to Kindle's native azw3 format.
And implementing sending to Kindle option is as simple as checking if Kindle is connected (in my setup check if path "E:\documents\OTHER" exists) and convert the selected file & write it to the Kindle directly.
I'd share the setup instructions, but I'm using older version of the Calibre, and the new one I've heard is significantly changed so I'm not sure if things would work out of the box (have to update to new Calibre & try it myself once I find the time).
Most of my books are .kfx files so to even get to that point I have to convert it. I was hoping to use Dopus as a library manager like 'calibre' but without all the many other things calibre does that I don't need. I really don't even need to be able to read the book on my pc, just extract the meta info and display the book cover as a thumbnail, so I can efficiently browse my books and move the ones I want at that time back onto my kindle.
So it would go something like this:
Plug in the kindle, use it as a USB
Move the books I don't need to have on the kindle into a folder on my pc
Convert into a format dopus can read and/or extract the meta information and image from the file
Have a viewer full of book cover thumbnails, titles, and author names I can browse through
Move the books I want back onto the kindle
The core issue of course is the kindle's native file organization really doesn't scale well. If you download a lot of books and use 'send to kindle' for other docs you want to read later, chances are you'll forget about them (if you're me), because you can't just visually scan a bookshelf as a memory prompt. It's like putting books you want to read later at the back of a closet where the holiday decorations and winter clothes are stored- even if you remember they're in there, getting the ones you want out is daunting and onerous.
I used to spend an absurd amount of time tagging and managing media in software like Calibre, foobar2000, Comic Rack, Plex, LaunchBox, etc. In Calibre I had a complex system of hierarchical tags, I edited cover images so they were all the same aspect ratio, and I made sure all book details were complete and accurate. But in recent years I stopped, it's just not worth the effort.
My current ereader natively reads both epub and azw3, so I really don't need to convert anything. I don't need sync functionality either since I can add books by just copying them to the reader via USB. And since I only copy books over when I intend to read them, there's no need to tag them for searching/browsing on the reader.
These days, my ebook collection is just sorted in folders by author. I keep a portable version of Calibre around for removing DRM, but that's it.
My advice - keep it simple and spend more time reading
For anyone who might be interested, I ended up going with 'Alfa eBook Manager' which does a great job of organizing my library and syncing from multiple sources, plus it stores the covers for the books in my pc library in their own folder, which means I can use DOpus to browse the thumbnails without needing to actually open the book manager. It's a small thing but I like combining functions where possible and dopus has been great for that!
